Why your personal brand is really what matters

Why your personal brand is really what matters

Golden Key International Honour Society, founded on 29 November 1977, is an academic honor society which recognizes and encourages scholastic achievement and excellence among college and university students from all academic disciplines.

As a young professional in today’s competitive job market, developing your personal brand is an essential step in any successful job hunt. Regardless of your career field or background, your personal brand is something that will help you beyond even interviews and applications.

A personal brand allows you to show the world how you are unique from others in your industry. Use your brand to communicate your skills, market yourself, and control your career development. A strong personal brand will serve you well if you decide to break out on your own as an entrepreneur, or are just looking to build up a freelance audience. Here are 5 ways you should be developing your personal brand.

1) Identify your strengths

Identifying the top strengths or skills you have to offer the professional world is the first step in developing your personal brand. Think about the top areas in which you excel. Consider previous jobs, internships, courses or even group projects, and take note of your top contributions. If you can identify one or two specific specialties, it will make developing your personal brand much easier.

2) Create a strong platform

Whether it’s a website, blog or Facebook page, your primary platform is very important when developing your personal brand. Make sure your website includes your name or brand name, and represents the skills you have to offer. Think about how you describe yourself, your skills and your background. It should be easy for visitors to immediately identify your top appeal.

3) Use social media

Utilizing social media is one of the easiest, yet most important ways of developing your personal brand. This is where you’ll reach the widest audience when sharing your content, and where you’ll grow most quickly. As a young professional, you likely have experience using various social media platforms for personal use, but now it’s time to amp up your professional accounts!

4) Set the tone

For both social media and your website, you’ll want a consistent tone and a key message. If you’ve identified why people should be attracted to your brand or skills, this might be a bit easier. You want visitors and clients to know what they can expect from your platforms, and of course, you’ll want to publish only the highest quality content.

5) Maintain consistency

Once you’ve developed your own voice and message, maintaining consistency across your platforms is key for growth. Posting daily, and curating your content for different platforms is the best way to keep your followers and clients interested. Sharing useful, interesting content will keep them coming back for more. Once you’ve identified your top skills, keep it consistent in terms of the type of content you post. If your specialization is in SEO and blogging, your followers might not be interested in posts about unrelated topics. Keep your posts on point.

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About Golden Key

Golden Key is the world's largest collegiate honor society. Membership into the Society is by invitation only and applies to the top 15% of college and university sophomores, juniors and seniors, as well as top-performing graduate students in all fields of study, based solely on their academic achievements. As an international honor society with more than 400 chapters at colleges and universities around the world, Golden Key is committed to a high standard of scholastic achievement, and an ethos of integrity, innovation, respect, collaboration and diversity.